WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce platform designed to provide merchants with the tools they need to sell products online effectively. Integrating Beans with WooCommerce enhances this experience by enabling merchants to boost customer loyalty through a rewards system. With Beans for WooCommerce, you can reward customers for their purchases, encouraging repeat business and fostering a loyal customer base.

Setup

To begin, install the Beans plugin for WooCommerce from the WordPress plugin repository. Follow the WordPress guideline for plugin installation. After installation, activate the plugin and connect Beans to your shop using the setup instructions.

To manually connect Beans to your WooCommerce store, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the plugins management page in your WordPress admin.
  2. Find Beans and select settings.
  3. On the Beans admin page within WordPress, follow the prompts and click Connect.
  4. Select your Beans account or create a new one. If you already have one, log in.
  5. Once on the connect page, choose Connect manually.
  6. Provide WooCommerce API keys as instructed.
  7. In WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > REST API.
  8. Select Add key to create a new key for Beans.
  9. Fill out the form: name the key, choose the primary admin as the user, and set permissions to Read/Write.
  10. Generate and copy the API Key.
  11. Paste the keys into the Beans interface form field.
  12. Click Connect to complete the process.

Reinstall

If you suspect the Beans plugin isn’t properly installed on your WordPress site, Beans provides a straightforward solution to address this without any negative side effects.

  1. From the Beans admin dashboard, navigate to the WooCommerce integration home page.
  2. Select Status in the integration navigation menu.
  3. From the Actions dropdown on the top right, select Reinstall Beans.

Rewards page

The Beans plugin for WooCommerce automatically adds a rewards page to your shop. By default, you can access the page at http://myshop.com/rewards-program, assuming your website’s full URL is https://myshop.com.

To display the rewards program page, Beans uses the shortcode [beans_page]. This makes it very easy to edit the page if necessary.

It is recommended to add the link to your rewards program in the main menu to make it easy for your customers to access. Here is how to do it: How to Add Navigation Menu in WordPress

Caching

Many WordPress websites use caching to improve performance for visitors. While caching can enhance website speed and traffic, it can be difficult to debug, especially for dynamic websites.

In most cases, it is recommended not to cache dynamic pages because cached versions may become outdated or inaccurate. There are two types of pages on a website: static and dynamic. A static page has unchanging content, whereas dynamic pages frequently update and are not suitable for caching.

We recommend excluding the rewards program page and the referral program page from your caching system because they are dynamic and do not display the same content for each customer.

WP Rocket

Follow these step-by-step instructions to configure exclusions with WP Rocket:

  1. Navigate to the File Optimization section in WP Rocket.

  2. Uncheck all checkboxes in the JavaScript Files section and save your changes.

  3. Go to the Advanced Rules option and add the following lines to the Never Cache URLs section:

    /rewards-program/(.)
    /referral-program/(.)
    /my-account/(.*)
    
  4. Save your settings.

  5. Clear your cache and visit the program pages in your store.

Troubleshooting

Issues with connecting Beans

Beans uses the WooCommerce API to access your store data. Here are the most common reasons why you might experience issues with connecting Beans to your store.

  • Password-protected store: To connect Beans to your store, you might need to temporarily disable password protection for your store.
  • ”coming soon” or “site under construction” plugin that restricts public access: This will block API access, which is essential for our application. To resolve this, temporarily disable the plugin to allow connection, then reactivate it afterward.
  • Incorrect API keys: Please double-check your API keys to ensure they are correct.
  • Invalid SSL certificate: Beans use SSL to securely connect to your store. If your SSL certificate is invalid, you might need to renew it.
  • Cache plugin: If you have a cache management plugin that strips the “Authorization” header, try disabling the plugin to see if it resolves the issue.
  • Incorrect permalinks: Ensure that your WordPress permalinks are set to a pretty permalink structure. The recommended setting is /%postname%/.
  • Outdated WordPress or WooCommerce version: Update your WordPress and WooCommerce to the latest versions.
  • Localhost: If you’re using localhost, you need to install Beans on a live server or use a localtunnel URL such as ngrok to connect to your store.
  • Invalid WordPress site location: WordPress must be installed at the root level of your domain or subdomain. For example, if you’re developing a store at www.example.com/dev/, our server will attempt to connect to www.example.com. To avoid this issue, install the development store on a subdomain like the dev.example.com